What Then?

[originally published in Enterprise Conversation, a UBM/DeusM publication ]

You hear the term “BYOD” spoken of as though it were the touchstone
of a technological revolution, a reflection of the rapid and revolutionary
change in telecommunications. The “consumerization
of IT” is said to be felt most profoundly by those tasked with provisioning
the smartphones and tablets of thousands of employees, with hundreds of varying
choices. Mobile Device Management is
becoming, or has already become, the next-generation PBX.

That, or
it’s something your employer can now write off, perhaps to offset the
new health insurance mandate. As
part of its second annual State of BYOD Report, Good Technology polled 98 of its enterprise customers to gauge the changes in
BYOD adoption among businesses in the course of one year.

It’s this pie chart that hits you square in the face. Even though 98 customers may be a small
sample size, among those respondent companies that do have BYOD policies
already in place, a staggering 93 percent expect their employees to end up
paying some service costs, perhaps after stipends and compensation. A full 50 percent don’t reimburse their
employees whatsoever.

“Ten or fifteen years ago, it was quite customary for
employers to reimburse employees for dial-up Internet, and then DSL and later
broadband service at home, with the justification that there was productivity,
real work being done at their home,” says Kerry MacLennan, Good Technology’s
senior director of professional services.
She continues:

That’s really not a very common practice any more for any
employer that I’m aware of. That’s
because, as home Internet service and high-speed broadband service became
ubiquitous at home and became adopted as a consumer choice, there really wasn’t
any incremental costs to the employee to connect to the corporate network and
get e-mail at home. We’re in that same
transition zone for mobility that we were ten years ago with home Internet.

In my conversation with Good Technology, spokespersons
cautioned me not to interpret this trend in terms of businesses pushing costs
onto their employees. Rather, as
MacLennan illustrates here, it’s a case of businesses leveraging the power of
dollars already spent for services that it no longer makes much business or
even cultural sense to replicate. “Cost
savings are often one of the top objectives,” says MacLennan, “but not
typically the big driver.”

Allen Spence, Good’s VP for worldwide professional services,
adds:

A huge number of companies’ employees already have a
smartphone, and they already have a data plan in the 2 GB range. Across all of our users, 98-plus percent use
less than 3 MB of data per month. So
[businesses] aren’t pushing costs out to [employees]. Companies are taking advantage of something
their employees are already doing.
Because it folds into these massive data plans that smartphone users
already have, [in most cases] there’s really not an additional cost being
incurred.

Prior to the annexation of home broadband, the technology
wave that was described with the moniker “consumerization” was the PC
revolution of the 1980s. Back then, small
businesses were deemed the drivers, the risk-takers, and the early adopters,
with larger corporations lagging behind, waiting for others to set the trends
and incur the expenses involved with perfecting software. Today, as Good’s executives describe it to
me, the BYOD trend is being led by the opposite end of the train. Big
businesses are the early adopters, I’m told, urged forward by C-level
executives who are insisting their iPads and Galaxy S devices get added to the
network in 24 hours.

Among respondent companies with an employee base above
10,000, some 45 percent already have BYOD policies in place. For those segments with fewer than 10,000
employees, the average was 11 percent.

Granted, most of Good’s respondents were larger companies, I
was told; and the market segment with the highest BYOD adoption rate — finance
and insurance — ranked highest in the survey as well. But as Good’s Spence explains, there’s a new
driving force behind the finance segment’s push that’s both surprising and
underappreciated:

They had the biggest motivation due to regulation to secure
their corporate communication. It used
to be RIM and BlackBerry, but when they could get that same security on more
desirable devices, they moved there faster than a logistics or manufacturing
company. They had that intense data
protection requirement, but they also had a demand for new, cool phones that
they were already carrying anyway.
[Finance] were the early adopters in a big way.

Scott Fulton On Point

First there was the wheel, and you have to admit, the wheel was cool. After that, you had the boat and the hamburger, and technology was chugging right along with that whole evolution thing. Then there was the Web, and you had to wonder, after the wheel and the hamburger, how did things make such a sudden left turn and get so messed up so quickly? Displaying all the symptoms of having spent 35 years in the technology news business, Scott Fulton (often known as Scott M. Fulton, III, formerly known as D. F. Scott, sometimes known as that loud guy in the corner making the hand gestures) has taken it upon himself to move evolution back to a more sensible track. Stay in touch and see how far he gets.

Scott M. Fulton, III, is the author of this blog, and all text contained therein is his own unless otherwise noted explicitly. Some content may have appeared in other publications first, before being reprinted here, and is reprinted according to publishing agreements. Scott Fulton is always responsible for his own content.